Hey there and welcome to this week’s Lez Liberty Lit!
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is the first undocumented person to ever be nominated for a National Book Foundation Award for The Undocumented Americans. As Myriam Gurba writes:
“‘Just as none of us is outside of or beyond geography,’ writes Said, ‘none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography.’ In this spirit, Karla writes undocumented people into the national literature. An alternative path to naturalization, one that uses art to make Americans of herself and her subjects. In Americans, she flips the whitest of real estate, turning the blank page into sanctuary space, a place where one can both hide from and expose the often ethnonationalist nightmare that is the United States.”
Here’s why private investigators are everywhere (not just in a literary sense).
Art must allow for the unexpected.
“The pandemic has left women in academia fearing for the future of their careers.”
At Electric Literature, I interviewed A World Between author Emily Hashimoto on writing a non-linear queer romance.
Reading is not an inherent moral good.
“Writing fantasy lets me show the whole truth of disability.”
Here’s Claudia Rankine on what it means when a white person “doesn’t see color.”
“I want my kids to understand that computers are […] machines that will do only what you tell them to do,” writes Greg Lavallee at Slate in a piece that is largely about the hellscape of remote learning for five year olds but which also gets at the same theme as Shelli’s recent take on phone minimalism, namely that you don’t have to be beholden to the small boxes near your hands and everything you’ve ever given them to store.
Write a memoir in essays.
I just learned that there are (were, depending on when you’re reading this) odds for the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature and here they are.
Here are the 2020 National Book Award finalists.
Read these banned books and these 12 banned books by writers of color. Read these seven translated books about queer life in Taiwan and China. Read these seven books about slavery and abolition by Black 19th-century writers. Read these 33 essential works of fiction by Iranian writers. Read these 13 YA books in October. Read these seven dystopian novels about motherhood. These 10 books are set in bars and almost feel like being in one.
